‘Fucksake, Tony. Leave it. They were doing their job and they do it well. It was a murder scene, not an art exhibition. A dead man. Bullet hole. Blood and brains on the path. That’s it. No one’s going to put it in a fucking frame and hang it on a wall.’
‘Aye, okay.’
‘Sorry, but it just gets on my nerves sometimes.’
‘Aye, I said okay. I get it.’
Her face softened.
‘Sorry, long night. Very long night. And I’m back in at nine. I love that you can see all that stuff when I can only see scumbags but not tonight, okay?’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘You’re right. It was out of order. Come here, you better get some sleep.’
She kissed him and snuggled in. Within two minutes she was dead to the world.
He knew that she was right about the photographs but she was so wrong about the rest.
The picture of Quinn spilling all over that pavement flooded his mind. He imagined the pool being dark, warm and lustrous. Streetlamps glistening on the claret sea and causing highlights that his Canon EOS-1D could pick out beautifully, the pavement washed in the price of the drug king’s sin, painted from a palette of scarlet dues. Quinn laid out on a concrete canvas, glassy eyes not looking up to the glowering heavens but cast down to his maker.
He envisaged heavy-set, scarred men with mouths open wide in shock, seeing their protector thrown to the ground. Movie-still flash, capturing guilt and fear. Inch by inch, the creeping realization dawns that retribution has stepped out of the shadows. Deep down they’d always known there would be a price to pay.
Death’s sheen shimmered bright in his camera’s eye; Malky Quinn’s tainted juices seeping through Glasgow’s stone floor. A perfect picture of bloody comeuppance and inevitable consequence. A picture he didn’t have the chance to take but one that he could still frame in his memory.
CHAPTER 9
Wednesday 14 September
Winter was due to be in Pitt Street till it was dark. Two Soups had moaned the previous day about his Central Station performance until Winter was effectively grounded like a teenager. Filing, answering phones and lobbing crumpled balls of paper into the bin was the order of the day.
He’d hauled his arse in two hours after Rachel had left for the crime scene or the operations rooms. She hadn’t said which, just kissed him, saying she’d catch up later, and left him to the newspapers and the TV.
The Record had splashed it all over the front and four pages inside. They had gone absolutely tonto over it. Massive, lurid pictures of dire quality. Grainy, badly lit shots of vague shapes on an indistinct canvas. Crap photographs that Winter would have killed to have taken. One of those occasions for the papers when content is worth much more than quality. The same could be said for the writing, he thought. Vast slabs of speculation, innuendo, background and bollocks. Screaming headlines and scaremongering text. And their coverage was the best on offer.
At his desk in Pitt Street, Winter grabbed a copy of the Sun which had been left lying around and saw much the same in there. Three pages this time but less didn’t mean more. Where there was speculation they brought conjecture, where there was innuendo they brought insinuation, where there was bollocks they brought more bollocks. Killings of two underworld figures in as many days let the tabloids run wild, foaming at the mouth with alarmist indignation. It was a sensation, it was stunning, it was unprecedented. SLAIN, shrieked the Record. BLOODBATH, yelled the Sun.
The Sun ’s pictures made the Record ’s look like something Enrique Metinides would have told his grandchildren about. They’d been there later and were further away. Quinn’s body might as well have been a sleeping dog for all you could tell. It didn’t stop them using them the size of the page and leaving readers to use their imagination the best they could.
He stuck the radio on for a bit and Clyde offered a verbal version of much of what he’d read. Caldwell and Quinn were dead so contempt laws went out the window. They were called all the names that they couldn’t while they were alive – gangster, drug runner, criminal, crime lord – the euphemism ‘well-known businessman’ wasn’t heard once. At last the media could call them for what they were. Caldwell was said to be a prime suspect in the murder of Barney Reid while Quinn was said to be responsible for a ‘string of unsolved killings’.
The reporter from the end of Kinnear Road spoke in hushed, almost reverential tones as he told how the residents of the quiet east end street were stunned, shocked and altogether cliched about the shooting in their midst. He had to up the tone quite considerably when a local ned started shouting, ‘Hey wanker, ur you on the radio? Ur ye? Ur ye on the noo? Wanker, ah’m talking tae you!’
They had to cut to one he’d done earlier, an interview with an unnamed concerned citizen whose name Winter was betting was Sadie or Magrit. She’d lived in the street for seventeen years and had never seen anything like it (as if gangster executions were a common occurrence elsewhere). She hadn’t exactly heard the shot and she didn’t exactly know Mr Quinn but she knew who he was and it was absolutely terrible. Her weans were off the school because they were so traumatised, so they were. Fucking bollocks, the lot of it. Not least the fact that he was stuck there while all the fun was on the other side of the city. The way it was, he’d have been as well still being in IT, asking halfwits if they’d tried switching it off and on again. He wanted to be out there on the streets where the blood was, where the dirt lay thick and the dark shadows were long, where the people were. Real people, bad people, good people, scared people. He wanted to be where they lived and died, particularly where they died. Winter couldn’t make out the hole in Quinn’s head from the newspaper photos but nor could he get it out of his mind. Bone fragments, blood spatter, open mouth, open hole, a clean kill by an expert, dead centre, dead shot. The pavement damp eating into his jacket, nibbling at the fabric, the earth reclaiming its own a millimetre at a time. The dampness clambering up his shoulder as the blood ran down, passing each other like strangers never destined to meet. Life and death on parallel tracks.
Suddenly, his phone beeped with a text message, making him jump and slamming the shutter down on the photograph in his mind.
It was Addison, asking if he was being a good boy today. Just what he needed. Less than a minute later he texted again, moaning about how he was having to deal with the hooker killing as well as the fallout from the Caldwell and Quinn shootings.
The pecking order was clear to see. The going rate for a pound of drug baron flesh was a lot higher than for the living variety sold around Anderston. Just as the killing of the hooker was a step above the stabbed dealer Sammy Ross, so Malky Quinn was way above whatever had happened in Wellington Lane. Anything else had to take second place.
Winter’s mobile rang and the display screen flashed up Addison’s name.
‘Alright, loser? How’s life in the cupboard?’
‘Fuck off. This is doing my head in as it is and I don’t need your shit as well.’
‘Ah, don’t wet yourself, wee man. Has Two Soups stolen your sense of humour as well? This city’s going crazy and I could do with a pint before the day’s out. Up for it?’
‘Aye, of course. So what’s happening out in the real world?’
‘Real world? If this is reality then they can keep it. I take it you heard about Malky Quinn? I’ve had calls from all over the city and it’s kicking off big time. I’ve already heard of three cases of guys getting dragged off the street into cars and having the living shit kicked out of them, two separate drive-bys with clowns taking potshots at windows and umpteen stories about knuckle draggers holding meetings that nobody is supposed to know about. They’re running around booting and shooting at anyone and anything that they think might be responsible. It’s open season.’
‘Any of them have any idea what they’re doing?’
‘Do they ever? Best guess from me is that they are lashing out, knocking heads and capping knees in a panic to get any information they can. They don’t have the brains to work out what the fuck’s going on so they are resorting to what they do best. They will beat the crap out of anyone they can get their hands on in an effort to force some line out of them.’
